No Place Like Home

Place of refuge; place where we can be ourselves; place we long to escape from; place where we are confronted by absence and loneliness; shabby downtown apartment or idyllic country cottage. Like it or loathe it; home is where we do most of our living. Home is; of course; many things to many poets. It is Billy Collins's favourite armchair and Imtiaz Dharker's 'Living Space' in the slums of Mumbai. It is Wordsworth's 'dear Valley' of Grasmere; and Philip Larkin's Coventry; that place where nothing so famously happens. It may be somewhere we long for; perhaps unattainably: Ovid and Mahmoud Darwish lament their home countries; Kapka Kassabova seeks 'a house we can never find'; while Jules Supervielle is 'Homesick for the Earth'. There is an abundance of domestic life. Attend a miserable breakfast chez Jacques Prevert; observe Wendy Cope and partner happily 'Being Boring'. Cut to Anna Barbauld's washing-day; Marilyn Nelson dusting; Buson mending his clothes and Fiona Wright contending with a Tupperware party. Peep in on Amy Lowell in the bath and John Donne in bed; Auden in the privy and Joy Harjo at the kitchen table. Here are removals and homecomings; neighbours good and bad. Inevitably; after a year of enforced domesticity; some lockdown thoughts (Anna McDonald; Pauline Prior-Pitt); Mary Oliver's dream house; Naomi Shihab Nye's homes where children live; the far-from-safe houses of U. A. Fanthorpe; and some final reflections on the idea of a dwelling place from Rumi; Emily Dickinson; John Burnside; Vinita Agrawal; Derek Walcott; Les Murray and Iman Mersal. It may not always be sweet; but there is certainly No Place Like Home.